From ABC: Mr. Eko interrogates Charlie about the Virgin Mary statue, Claire begins to lose faith in Charlie when she discovers his secret, and Jack is an interested observer when Kate gives the recovering Sawyer a much-needed haircut.

My Rating: 4 out of 4

Well, this show is finally back. It feels like forever since we've had new Lost to devour and dissect. Now we do. Tonight's episode, The 23rd Psalm, is an Eko centric episode, and for that I am very happy. Eko has interested me ever since the tail-enders made this appearance, and this episode gives a real good idea about Eko and his past. It also confuses things quite a bit, but I'll get to my own theories and thoughts on tonight's episode in a bit.

Tonight's episode starts with Claire approaching Eko with her baby. I love Claire and her talks with Locke, so I expected much of the same interaction here when it came to her and Eko. I was not at all disappointed because the two talking was catalyst that set off events for the rest of the episode. She knows he is religious by the short talk they have about her baby's name, and she suggests that Eko talks to Charlie because he seems to deny he is religious, but he carries around this Virgin Mary he found in the jungle.

As soon as she mentions the statue, Eko is immediately interested, and he asks her to show him the statue. She takes Eko back to her camp with Charlie, and Eko shocks her by busting open to statue. The heroin falls out, and this shocks her even more. She does know of Charlie's past, and he had never told what was inside the statue. Eko asks her where Charlie is, and she must tell him because the next scene has Eko confronting Charlie on the beach. Eko wants Charlie to take him to where he found the statue. Charlie agrees, but first he must tell Claire where he is going.

The two men return to camp, and it is immediately obvious Claire is upset. The two share a few words before Charlie and Eko are off to where Charlie found the statue. At first, Charlie tries to fool Eko, but Eko knows about the plane, and he wants to be taken to it. While confronting Charlie, he sees a flash of something off in the distance, and he directs them to continue on. Charlie ends up not able to find the plane, and Eko suggests he goes up into a tree to look from a higher vantage point.

When Charlie goes up, the shadow of something is seen again, but Eko stands firm. We finally get to see an up close look of the monster, but it really isn't a monster. It is a black cloud, and this immediately got me thinking, trying to figure it out. Black in most cases represents evil. I immediately remember the black swarms of flies from movies such as Amityville Horror when they showed this evil black cloud. Why didn't it attack Eko though? I have an idea about that as well.

Since this is Eko's flashback episode, we learn much about his past. We learn he was taken by mercenaries at a young age, and he became one of them. from what it looks like in the flashbacks, he became one of the top of them. He saved his brother from being taken by standing up and shooting an older man from his village. In later flashbacks, we see Eko trying to find a way to get a shipment of heroin out of Nigeria. He devises a plan to use a church plane carrying Virgin Mary statues and two priests to get the merchandise off. He goes to his brother, who is now a priest for his help. When his brother won't willingly help him, he asks his brother to make him a priest, which he does. Now with Eko being a holy man, the evil creature wouldn't be able to touch him because he is protected. The two finally find the plane, and Eko finds the body of his brother inside.

However, this is where some more thoughts come in. How did this plane end up on the island? The plane took off from Nigeria. The island is somewhere in the South Pacific. The state of the bodies leads me to believe the plane crashed sometime before. Now how did Eko know in fact it was the same Virgin Mary statues. Millions are made, and that shouldn't have been enough of a clue to lead him to the plane being on the island.

Now if Eko's brother hadn't shown up just before take-off, Eko would have been on the plane, and he would have been on the island sooner. Was it always meant for Eko to somehow end up on the island? Is he now some key to this whole puzzle of the island? The creature wouldn't touch him. Could it be he is the one that saves them from whatever fate they have on the island? A lot of questions, but this episode just brings up so many.

Once they find the plane, Eko burns it, and gives Charlie one of the statues to replace the one he broke to show Claire what was inside. By the end of the episode we see that Charlie has collected a whole bunch of little heroin filled statues after Claire throws them out of their portion of the camp for lying to her about the drugs.

While all this is happening in the jungle back at camp, Kate is giving Sawyer a haircut. A nice small moment of interaction between these two. Michael asks Kate for her shift at the hatch, and she gives it to him. At the end of the last episode, we saw Michael communicating with someone he thinks is Walt using the hatch computer. This communication continues this week, and we can see from the previews it will only end up causing problems.

At the end of the episode, we see a nice montage of scenes of the tail end survivors settling in and making friends with our original survivors. I had wondered where Libby and Ana Lucia had disappeared to. In fact, not a lot of the cast was seen this week, and if there were it was for a brief moment or two. This episode was truly focused on Eko.

Eko and his story made this episode great though. It really added some more twists and turns to this already complicated story. Eko makes things even more interesting, and the fact that the plane shows a connection to someone on the island is good too. Eko was truly meant to be on the island. I'm wondering if there are any other similar stories such as this one on the island, and if they will be exposed in time. Don't forget if you missed this week's episode, you can catch it on iTunes. Check my sidebar for the link to that.